Spirituality of the Readings

Who Are We?

This Sunday Jesus begins to instruct the disciples about how to be his followers. In the Gospels of previous Sundays we have been following the story of his early career.

He went to be baptized. Then, when he heard that John the Baptist had been murdered, he moved from Galilee to Capernaum. He chose his apostles there. Last Sunday we reminisced about his “presentation” as an infant, which itself looked forward to his suffering.

If you are like salt, then don’t lose your flavor.

In this week’s Gospel he tells them to “be what you are.” He gives images. If you are like salt, then don’t lose your flavor. If you are like a lamp then don’t put a basket over yourself where no one can see your light. 

Consoling advice.

But would the disciples have followed Jesus if they had known what it really would mean to “be what you are”? The First Reading says it means to share your bread with the hungry, to shelter the oppressed and the homeless. Clothe the naked. Do not turn away from your own. This is how you let your light shine in the darkness. It is the meaning of “becoming yourself.” 

A big assignment.

And in our own day, “I just want to be me,” sounds selfish. 

“I can get whatever I want whenever I want it.” 
“Take care of number one.” 
“If it feels good, do it.” 

And so on. 

In the older culture of the United States, one of the classic songs made popular by Frank Sinatra was “I Did It My Way”: 

I planned each charted course,
each careful step, along the byway,
and more, much more than this,
I did it my way.*

And so on. 

The main message is that “I” have succeeded in life because it is mine. Me! No one dared to interfere with me because I did everything “my way.” 

There is a backdrop of fear in these lyrics, something about not being free to be myself, about having to do everything according to someone else's will. 

Aren’t we are just cogs in a giant, international, industrial wheel? The world and its population are very, very large, no surprise that mass production, mass advertising and mass purchasing give us the feeling that we are worth very little in ourselves other than contributing to the market, doing and buying what it dictates. Maybe we should at last face down the great machine and defy it outright. In the USA our coming election(s) and the surprising impeachment seem to hover around the same polarities. 

But the scriptures assume just the opposite. They suppose that every human being is created with an unrepeatable, deep, interior shape. Rather than having to fight others in order to do my own will, I need to allow the Spirit of God to find a home deep within the interior space that is me. This Spirit will not invade me because it is the essence of respect, of forgiveness, of loving.

It is God. 

You and I are built to be at one with this Spirit. “Becoming myself” means becoming what I was built to be, a home for the Spirit of Jesus and of God.

God’s love becomes us. 

John Foley, SJ

**From Saint Louis University